Three-dimensional salvo attack guidance considering communication delay

This paper investigates the problem of salvo attack guidance law design for multiple missiles against a stationary target considering communication delay. The proposed guidance law requires no information on time-to-go and consists of two guidance stages. More specifically, a simple decentralized midcourse guidance law is proposed to provide desired initial conditions for the latter phase. As for the second guidance phase, all missiles are switched to classical pure proportional navigation guidance law. Considering the fact that the communication delay is inevitable in real applications, the corresponding allowed maximum upper bound of the communication delay among all interceptors is also derived analytically. Nonlinear numerical simulations clearly confirm the effectiveness of the proposed formulation.